Holding Your Absence
by ekc293
Summary: She can't stand this. An 07x01 post-ep. So obvious spoilers for the premiere.


Yeah... I didn't expect it either.  
>For Geneva. It's not my best, but I hope I could do worse.<p>

(also, I repeat, _**SPOILERS FOR THE SEASON 7 PREMIERE**_)

* * *

><p>She couldn't stand it.<p>

A month. It's been a month and they weren't any closer to finding out where or why Castle had been taken. There's no new information to put on the murder board and there hasn't been any leads for weeks. And none of it adds up. Why would someone take Castle while he was on his way to their wedding? Why would they take him and how the hell did no one see anything happen? Or afterwards? A best-selling author that already has a significant public persona goes missing, his face is plastered all over the news and in newspapers and nothing. No one sees him. Somebody famous goes missing and not one person on this planet can give her a lead.

It's like he just vanished. How do you just _vanish?_

It didn't make any sense. He loved her – he _knew _her. Even if he was… Even if he was going to leave her, he wouldn't want to hurt her, right? He wouldn't just… fake his own death to get away from her. Why would he just leave?

She can feel the panic boiling inside her and she pushes herself away from the window, desperate to get some space between herself and the evidence. She stumbles into the coffee table in her living room and blindly makes her way into the bathroom.

She slams her hand on the light switch, meets her own red eyes in the mirror and tries to breathe through it but she can't get enough air into her lungs, and she shakes her head in frustration.

She's a mess. God she is such a fucking mess and maybe that's why he left her.

Because that's what the evidence says, isn't it? That he left her. He wasn't in the car. He withdrew money from his own bank account to pay to destroy the SUV that drove him away from their wedding. And now there's no sign of him. No ransom calls, no credit card activity, nothing. The FBI was gone because they have no reason to believe he was taken and god _dammit _what was so wrong with her that he would just leave? Why would he leave her at the altar? Why wouldn't he just _tell her_?

She's reaching for the drawer before she knows what she's doing, grabbing the cuticle scissors she hardly ever touches and lifts it to her hair.

She's watching her reflection, the crying, shell of the woman she's become over the past two years, but she hardly registers when she cuts off the first chunk of hair. It falls into her bathroom sink and she keeps going, a handful of strands at a time, watching as she slowly turns back into the woman she was before she met him – the short-haired, no-nonsense, stone-faced detective who didn't have time to get her heart broken anymore.

When she's finished, when her hair is almost all one length, she really focuses on her reflection.

It doesn't look bad. She's always had a face for shorter hair, and she reaches up, tries to brush it back over her shoulder like he did on their first night together but it barely even grazes her shirt. The scissors fall from her hand, her hands fall to the counter and slip over the edge, and her knees fall the floor as she crumples away from her own reflection, the grip on her heart moving up her throat, the air only leaving her lungs through broken sobs.

She doesn't want to be the woman that she was before him - before she let herself give in and take a chance with him. She doesn't want to go back to that. She doesn't want to go back to how she was before he told her that he loved her.

He loves her. He loves her and she loves him and she can't go back to living like that didn't mean anything.

He changed her. He changed her and she'd like to think that it was for the better and that can't be for nothing. He wouldn't change her just to leave her – not when he knows what happened with her parents; not when he saw her lose Royce, and not when he held her in his arms after she lost Montgomery. He's not that cruel.

And she can't go back to that.

She pulls her hands, grips her hair in her fists and sucks in as much air as she can through her teeth.

"He loves you," she gritted out between her clenched teeth.

"He loves you. And he loved you then, too."

She stops, hadn't realized that she'd started rocking back and forth on bathroom floor or that she'd been staring at the hair on the ground that had missed the sink. She leaned forward, pinched some of it between her fingers and held it up towards the light. Her engagement ring caught the light, his words from years ago echoing in her mind and slipping off of her tongue before she can stop it.

"_Always_."

She lowers her hand down away from the light, her eyes never leaving her ring finger.

"That means something," she whispers, bringing her hand into her chest to cradle the ring against her heart.

"It means everything."


End file.
